Never a City So Real by Alex Kotlowitz

Author:Alex Kotlowitz
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9781400097500
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2004-07-06T10:00:00+00:00

Andrea Lyon is a mad lawyer, which, as the woman on the cell phone intuited about her friend’s attorney, probably explains Lyon’s success as well. In nineteen capital cases, she has saved all of her clients from the electric chair. Lyon is an outsized figure: six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and sturdily built. “What does size matter?” you might reasonably ask. But in such a macho environment, trust me, it does. Lyon began practicing in this building as a public defender, in 1978, and at the time she was one of only a handful of women lawyers here; there were no women judges at all. In those early days, one judge stubbornly referred to Lyon alternately as “sir,” “gentleman,” and “Mr. Lyon.” “At first I thought it was a slip of the tongue,” Lyon recalled. “But it became quite pointed. I’d pretend I had this little tape recorder that I’d turn on in the morning and it would say, ‘This is your problem, it’s not my problem. This is your problem, it’s not my problem.’ ” It calmed her down—and Lyon, by her own admission, occasionally needs calming down. One colleague recalls the time a prosecutor, during a break in the courtroom, called Lyon a vile name: Lyon responded by grabbing him by the collar and nearly lifting him off his feet. (It was this reaction, Lyon believes, that finally earned her the respect of her male colleagues.) When I mentioned Lyon’s name to a judge, he smiled. “She can heat things up,” he said.

Another story that has long made the rounds—and that Lyon confirmed for me—is that many years ago, when Lyon was in law school in Washington, D.C., a man tried to mug her while she was walking home late one night. But when he grabbed her by the arm and reached for her purse, Lyon responded by slugging him and knocking him to the ground, breaking his jaw. “I couldn’t leave him there bleeding,” she said. “So I called an ambulance. I’m such a public defender.”

Lyon, who now works out of DePaul University’s Law School (in the Loop), where she operates a clinic that handles primarily capital murder cases, invited me to join her one morning at 26th Street, where she had to file two rather routine motions in two separate cases. Cases are called at nine-thirty in the morning, so it’s best to get there early to find parking. As you pass through the metal detectors (which have turned up knives disguised as various items, including a lipstick container, a lighter, and a house key), you may spot a jacketless gentleman in white shirt and tie chatting with passersby. He’s the chief judge, Paul Biebel, who makes a point every morning to position himself at the building’s entrance so that he can talk with public defenders, prosecutors, police officers, and sheriff’s deputies. On this particular day, a court administrator pauses to alert Judge Biebel to the rumor that there’s a man in the building practicing law without a license.

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